It's also why I opened my initial post with "There needs to be more research into this horrible disease."
https://iv.iiarjournals.org/content/invivo/21/5/707.full.pdf
Other trials into antivirals have been negative.
This study screened for active vs latent on number of viruses in patients vs assumed health controls, bottom chart here is what you would evaluate Valtrex effectiveness against.
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
EBV, HHV6 and HHV6 tend to reactivate during stress, but don't typically cause symptoms. I think what we're seeing in ME/CFS is this reactivation, but it's not necessarily what is causing the problem (if it was, antivirals would help, but they don't).
I was suggesting to crossreference Valtrex effectiveness against the activated virii in the study I linked. If Valtrex is not effective against the reactivated cohorts, we need more falsification around antivirals <-> ME/CFS.
_Are they though?_ This needs a citation. What constitutes large? A majority? That's unlikely, especially in the UK where medications aren't prescribed unless there's measured clinical value in it. I'm sure some are finding relief, but until we know how many and how much relief it could just be a placebo effect, right?
I hope that anyone affected by ME finds relief, but the discourse online about it always confuses me. There's always a slight undercurrent of "those mean doctors" and a breakthrough _just_ on the horizon:
"That could be a massive breakthrough, but..."
"apparently a large percentage of ME/CFS patients are finding relief..."
"Apparently there is some relation to the herpes virus, although nobody understands how or why."
In reality, nobody actually knows. Some scientists have got some ideas, some of which stand up to some form of scientific scrutiny. But that's basically it.